The latest major development was that Bob Burge, one of the defendants had, for a time, stopped responding to all court activity and nearly had a judgment declared against him but found new counsel to take up the case and is fighting on.

At least that was the latest as of a few weeks ago.

The latest major development was that Bob Burge, one of the defendants had, for a time, stopped responding to all court activity and nearly had a judgment declared against him but found new counsel to take up the case and is fighting on.

At least that was the latest as of a few weeks ago.

However, what was most striking to me was the number of people who didn’t understand copyright law and how it works on the Web. Three-quarters of the people who responded said that they felt they had no rights to the work they posted on the Web and over half said that anything on the Web was basically a “free for all”.

In fact, these people understand copyright completely and exactly how it works on the web.

Why are people copying things on the web? Why do they view even their own works as being “worthless”? Perhaps it is because, put simply, they are worthless. Or at least, no reasonable monetary value can be placed on them.

How much is a book worth? A modern novel can probably be compressed into less than 1MB of data. Throughout history, this was quite a lot of data, and it cost quite a bit of money to copy and distribute that to people. Copyright was an enforceable and rational concept because information was a scarce quantity.

But now? 1MB of information can be transmitted in seconds, to anywhere in the world, ad infinitium, for a cost that is virtually zero. How much is 1MB of information actually worth to anyone? $10? Ludacrious. $1. No less ludacrious. $0.01. Still excessively priced. The reality is that we don’t have denominations which can value information anymore. As time goes by, even massive data files like HD movies (50GB) and databases will see their worth evaporate. Yes, this means that there will be no incentive to produce certain works, but this has happened to many goods before.

So when people are told that they can’t copy certain information because it is copyrighted, what are they going to think? The internet is a torrent and telling people that it is wrong to copy files is like telling them it is wrong to collect rainwater(In some places, collecting rainwater is in fact against the law). You can pass such laws but the reality is, reasonable people will not obey them.

Copyright in its current form is an unreasonable prohibition on the rights of people. When data is so cheap, so easily obtained, so infinitely reproducible and so easy to find, it is nonsense to suggest that data be considered a sacrosanct form of property. The forces of reality have caught up with the concept of copyright and the concept must either adapt or perish in the modern world.

The future form of copyright must be constructed soon, because the current one is likely to shatter under the strain of the digital age.

The reason is that, for example, a Hollywood picture is a work created by 1000s of artists working together. Without some kind of corporate control over the copyright, licensing and distribution becomes a nightmare. Furthermore, without corporate copyright, there won’t be any motivation for corporations to invest in the creation of copyrighted works, thus individual artists would have to fund everything themselves.

We need a moral rights system like the one that exists in Europe that protects the rights of the individual artist separate from the corporation, but a complete abolition of corporate copyright is not the answer. However, a scaling back of the term may definitely be in order. 95 years for a corporate authorship is a very long time.